D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

[Vaalingrade]

I mean if your game is a "slice of life" game or your PCs are participating in fantasy Olympics, sure. But if they're playing dungeon delving people or purposely getting into harm's way or attempting to do whatever heroic thing that heroes are attempting to do, then death is and should be a possible and realistic thing, in my opinion.

I could do with one billion percent less realistic in my fantasy game.

 

[Older Beholder]

Sure. But if we are using complex rules and maps to track positions in combat then one would hope some sort of defeat is possible and victory is not inevitable regardless of what the players do, or it all seems very pointless. Now defeat doesn’t always need to mean death, but in some situations it is a plausible outcome of it.

I understand why people enjoy the possibility of character death I their TTRPG’s
I was responding to someone that said they didn’t understand how other people could enjoy the game without it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I understand why people enjoy the possibility of character death I their TTRPG’s
I was responding to someone that said they didn’t understand how other people could enjoy the game without it.

Right. I just don’t think that D&D is particularly good choice of a game for the approach you described.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Sure. But if we are using complex rules and maps to track positions in combat then one would hope some sort of defeat is possible and victory is not inevitable regardless of what the players do, or it all seems very pointless. Now defeat doesn’t always need to mean death, but in some situations it is a plausible outcome of it.

Unless the tactical action and doing cool stuff is the point and we'd rather not have that work dunked into the trash because an inanimate set of plastic polyhedrons is given too much reverence or as a whimsical means of the DM calling you stupid. (Which is what the common refrain of 'Dice or dumb decisions' means)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Unless the tactical action and doing cool stuff is the point and we'd rather not have that work dunked into the trash because an inanimate set of plastic polyhedrons is given too much reverence or as a whimsical means of the DM calling you stupid. (Which is what the common refrain of 'Dice or dumb decisions' means)

Then why use rules and dice? Just let the players describe the awesome way they win this time. You don’t need rules for this and I don’t get the desire to use the rules if you don’t want them to affect the outcome.

 

[Older Beholder]

Right. I just don’t think that D&D is particularly good choice of a game for the approach you described.

That doesn’t change that fact that plenty of people enjoy the roleplaying aspect of the worlds greatest roleplaying game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That doesn’t change that fact that plenty of people enjoy the roleplaying aspect of the worlds greatest roleplaying game.

As do I. I just don’t think the rules were put in the game by accident.

 

[tetrasodium]

That doesn’t change that fact that plenty of people enjoy the roleplaying aspect of the worlds greatest roleplaying game.

If you remove the chance of death from combat is it still roleplaying or does it become something closer to play acting?

An example of sports came up earlier, and apparently sports ttrpgs are a thing, but it would certainly be odd to describe that sports gameplay minus the chance of actually losing as a focus on anything other than guaranteed victory. There are games that focus on roleplaying and story, but those tend to have clear death analogs and/or various mechanics to override play acting by forcing the PCs to vow under the pressure of established story like fate's compels.

 

[Older Beholder]

If you remove the chance of death from combat is it still roleplaying

Yes, it is still roleplaying.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Then why use rules and dice? Just let the players describe the awesome way they win this time. You don’t need rules for this and I don’t get the desire to use the rules if you don’t want them to affect the outcome.

Not wanting one specific outcome is not the same as denying other outcomes.

People who don't understand the position of not wanting character death always seem to either completely ignore or pay lip service to push aside the fact the death needs not be on the table to have other outcomes, failure states, etc.

The point of the rules and the dice are, as they've always actually been: about fairness. We're playing pretend, and the rules are there to stop things being made up on the spot that makes things unfair. Like how back when playing pretend as kids, we'd insist our friends didn't hit us because we had a force field.

But that doesn't mean it's not still a game of pretend and there's some things we don't want to pretend-- like wasting two hours of character creation because someone completely unrelated to our game and our table has bought into the modern idea that death is the only stake that matters in media because some writers forty years ago got lazy, justified it with a bunch of philosophical nonsense around death and that's been infecting us as a culture ever since.